Academic words in english reading a passages

Vocabulary is one of the most important components of language. One of the main reasons to learn a language is to be able to use it to communicate. Knowledge of vocabulary is very important in language mastery. It is required in speaking, reading, writing, and listening activities. In academic field, words that occur in academic field at university level and beyond are called academic vocabulary. It occurs reasonably frequently in academic texts and books. Coxhead (2000) developed the Academic Word List (AWL), which contains 570 word-families which occurs frequently across wide range of academic texts. These word-families are divided into ten sub-lists, which rank the frequency of the words. Academic texts which are used in university level and beyond should contain at least 10% academic vocabulary. This study investigated the academic vocabulary coverage and sub-list of reading passages used in Reading A. A total of 12 reading passages were used as the data of this study. The researcher used Web VocabProfilers Classic v.4 updated in 2018 by Tom Cobb, to count the academic vocabulary coverage and the sub-list. The findings of this study showed that there were 6609 tokens from the reading passages, while the AWL tokens weree 304. As a result, the academic vocabulary coverage was 4, 60%, which is insufficient for readers at university level. Ebbers (2010) argued that academic words from sub-list 1–5 should be suitable for grade 6–8 students, while sub-list 6–10 should apply to high school and beyond. This study revealed that the AWL sub-list occurrences were rather low from sub-list 6–10, which is not suitable for readers at university level. In conclusion, reading passages used for Reading A should be reviewed in term of its academic vocabulary coverage